Traditionally, e-commerce vendors have had three options for hosting their websites. First, vendors could own and operate their own hosting equipment and software. This option burdens the vendor with the hardware costs as well as the costs of maintaining an information technology staff to maintain and support the website.
As an alternative, vendors have leased dedicated resources from remote hosting services, relying on the services' information technology staff to keep the website up and operational. This option reduces the burden on the vendor to hire and maintain its own information technology staff. However, this option limits the ability of the vendor to dynamically allocate computer resources to its website based on changing resource demands. Thus, vendors often have to lease more computing power than they normally need to be prepared for contingencies. This second option also generally limits the vendors' ability to modify the websites hosted on the remote equipment.
Other vendors have chosen to lease hosting services from providers of shared hosting services. These services host multiple vendors' websites on a single system. To preserve the security of such systems, their operations usually limit the functionality of the hosted application. The operator also limits the level of customization they provide to their customers so that no customer's customization inadvertently interferes with the operation of another customer's application.